Accessible Course Materials

About This Quick Guide

Creating accessible course materials helps ensure that all students can engage with the information and resources in your course. This quick guide offers practical tips, tools, and resources for improving the accessibility of common course materials, including documents, PDFs, and presentations.

Who Benefits?

The goal is to benefit all students by making your course materials accessible to the widest range of learners possible. The interventions suggested in this handout will benefit all students, including those with disabilities.

For example: A clear heading structure and descriptive alternative text of images and charts allows students with low/no vision use a screenreader. Moreover, clear structures reduce the cognitive load for all students and thereby allow them to focus longer on the important information conveyed in your materials.

This Is All Great, but I Have No Time to Do It…

Accessibility can feel overwhelming. The good news is that even small changes can have big impacts that make your course materials more accessible to a wide range of people in your audience.

Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying one opportunity and one barrier:

  • Plus One: One thing you will add to expand access
  • Minus One: One barrier you will remove or mitigate

Best General Practices

  • Tip 1: Start with an accessible source document.
  • Tip 2: Use proper heading styles (H1, H2, H3 in order).
  • Tip 3: Add alt text and long descriptions to all meaningful images, charts, graphs, and other visuals.
  • Tip 4: Use readable fonts (12pt min) and high contrast.
  • Tip 5: Link to descriptive text.
  • Tip 6: Keep tables simple with clear headers.
  • Tip 7: Add a table of contents for long documents.
  • Tip 8: Use built-in footnote/endnote features.
  • Tip 9: Ensure scanned text is searchable using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
  • Tip 10: Set document properties (title, language, author).

Run the accessibility checker before sharing.

PDFs

Provide Word documents, if possible.

  • When generating PDFs from Word, use “Save As” PDF
  • Use OCR for scanned documents
  • Set document language
  • Tag content to produce a logical reading order

Use Readable to check your document and make it more accessible.

PowerPoint

  • Give every slide a unique title
  • Add descriptive alternative text or long descriptions to meaningful visuals
  • Assign a reading order of elements for every slide
  • Use simple “Fade” or “Appear” effects and avoid flashing animations, overlays or multiple animations at the same time

Quick Tests Before Sharing

  • Text test: Try to copy and paste text from your PDF. If you cannot select it, the document needs OCR.
  • Keyboard test: Navigate using only the Tab key. Can you reach all interactive elements?
  • Accessibility Checker: Run the built-in checker (Review menu, then Check Accessibility)

Tools

Further Resources

Get Help

Teaching or Course Design Help

Submit a Consultation Request with CEE.

Compliance Questions

Brad Starkey-Owens, Digital Accessibility Program Manager - see contact info on the CEE Digital Accessibility page; virtual office hours Wed at 10 am.

Student Accommodation Questions

Contact the Student Disability Center (SDC) - [email protected] | 530-752-3184. Refer students directly to SDC rather than requesting medical documentation yourself.

Suggested Citation

Hartung, F. (2026). Accessible course materials. Center for Educational Effectiveness, University of California, Davis.